Gianfranco Rosi – Sacro GRA (2013)

Quote:
Sacro GRA is a 2013 documentary directed by Gianfranco Rosi.
The documentary engaged Rosi for two years for the shooting and about eight months for editing.

The work was presented at the 70th Venice International Venice Film Festival, where it won the Golden Lion for Best Film, the first documentary to win the top award in the seventy years of history of the Venice Film Festival.

The film documents, without outside comment or interviews of any kind, real-life scenes that take place along the “Grande Raccordo Anulare” (the GRA of the title), the ring highway around Rome.

Roberto is a stretcher bearer on an ambulance of the emergency service and therefore often spends the night rescuing victims of road accidents. He lives alone and sometimes converses in video-chat with a girlfriend. He has a tender relationship with his elderly sick mother.

Francesco is a botanist. We see him intent to defend an oasis of palm trees from the attack of the red palm weevil, a deadly parasite beetle that destroys the plants from the inside. The meticulousness with which he monitors the area, plant by plant, thanks to a digital recorder with which he detects the presence of parasites in the trunk of the palm trees, seem to suggest that the fight against the insect represents for him a real mission.

Filippo is a former prince who lives, together with his young wife Ksenia and their daughter Anastasia, in a sumptuous palace in the Boccea district that he rents for conferences, fashion shows, as bed and breakfasts and as location for picture stories. The huge house, furnished in a rather showy and eccentric way, even contains a small theater. During a break from shooting a picture story, the old actor Gaetano gives a sort of “life lesson” to a young female colleague.

Cesare is one of the few still remaining eel fishermen on the Tiber. He lives in a huge raft on the river, just under a viaduct of the GRA, together with his Ukrainian girlfriend.
Paolo is a former nobleman from Turin, with a long beard and a very polished talk, who – for reasons unknown to the viewer – now lives with his daughter Amelia, who’s preparing for a degree, in a studio apartment in a cold and anonymous tenement situated on a hill, occasionally overflown by airliners at low altitude. From his own voice we learn that from the window of the house you can enjoy the view of the dome of St. Peter.

In the same building, that the director always shoots from the outside and with the same frame fixed on each apartment, lives among others a South American family, whose young son dabbles with deejay equipment.

The in-depth analysis of the above mentioned “main characters” is accompanied by interlocutory shorter episodes, including: a group of prostitutes parked on the roadside in a dilapidated camper, a couple of young “cubist” girls that gladdens the sight of customers in a kiosk bar, a gathering of devotees attending a “apparition of the Virgin” and, in the Flaminio Cemetery at Prima Porta, the operations of disposal of old corpses destined to a mass grave not too far from the ring road.
(Wikipedia)

Sacro GRA (2013).mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1h 35mn
Size: 	2.79 GiB
Video
Codec: 	h264
Resolution: 	960x718 ~> 1276x718
Aspect ratio:  	16:9
Frame rate: 	24.000 fps
Bit rate: 	3 736 Kbps
BPP: 	0.226
Audio
#1:  	Italian 5.1ch AC-3 @ 384 Kbps

https://nitro.download/view/9500C6F6794E556/Sacro_GRA_(2013).mkv
https://nitro.download/view/C39BAB2A763EC81/Sacro_GRA_(2013).eng.srt
https://nitro.download/view/1C49E8B04D6D678/Sacro_GRA_(2013).ita.srt

Language(s):Italian
Subtitles:English, Italian